Jeremy Pound - Niche Down to Scale Up

Sales is my identity, right? That's like my value. And I always called that the Jeremy Show. And I thought that that was my value in the business and nobody else could do that. And I realized looking back that I didn't want to give that away, not because it couldn't be given away. I didn't want to give it away because I was like, well, if I give that away, what value do I have as a business owner? And so that's one question I want to pose to the audience. Do you not want to give it away because you don't think anyone can do it? Or do you not want to give it away because that's kind of become your identity, and that's the only thing you can do.

Welcome to season 2 of Owner Occupied on the business of property management. Owner Occupied is a show about property management in the real world. I'm your host, Peter Lohmann, co-founder and CEO of RL Property Management. For season 2, I have a different guest each week and we go deep into conversation about what actually works when trying to build and scale your property management business. Thanks for listening. Now let's go. Well, Jeremy, thanks for joining me today. I'm really excited to have you on as a guest and we're going to jump right into it. So if you wouldn't mind, just take a couple minutes and give us your background and kind your history and involvement with the property management industry.

So I run RentScale, and we are a sales coaching and training focused company, specifically for the residential property management industry. We are the absolute epitome of a niche business. I don't think I know anybody who does anything more niche than we do. And that affords us some pretty exciting experiments and knowledge and, you know, in-depth relationships like we have., and I've been doing this for, like I said, 4 years. Previous to that, since I was 20 years old, I've really been a self-supporting entrepreneur. I've done nothing but grow service-based businesses. First it was a, uh, website development company which morphed into a software engineering company. It was all web-based software at a time in the late, early 2000s, if that's a term, like the 2008 era, 2007 era. You might think that you could build a competitor to Facebook or something like that, or the next Facebook, and we used to do things like that. Little did we know how little of a chance our clients stood at doing that. And then, you know, 2008 happened. I knew nothing but success from the time I was 20 years old to like 28 years old. And, you know, the financial crisis hit, realized that my, my great business was built a little bit on sand, had to eat my humble pie, kind of had to, like so many of us, kind of recalculate what we're doing. Started an internet marketing agency and actually had some, you know, false starts and eventual success with that, ended up exiting that business. So what I learned from that is I did nothing but help service-based organizations like you, Peter, like property managers, build a sales department, realize that sales is not just something that happened to you or it was not a side project. It's something that can actually be systematized and formalized. And eventually one day you can actually hand it over to somebody else and you can have a sales department just like you can have a customer service department or maintenance department. And I really went all in on that and started focusing on helping service-based companies build sales departments, which was very fulfilling because I realized I woke up with just, you know, this crazy decade and a half of experience in a very specific thing. And that's when I was introduced to Jordan Walela from LeadSimple. And he said, hey, the property management industry needs this more than you know. Had me on his podcast, got like 20 leads the next day. Everybody, I think, including me, maybe one of them.

Yes. So that was 4 years ago. That was almost 4 years ago to the day because I actually went back and listened to that episode because that's how we got introduced. I heard Jordan's episode and I was so impressed with what you had to say. And I felt like it was so relevant to our property management community and our, in our industry that I like immediately texted Jordan and I was like, hey, I'd love to talk to this Jeremy guy because I think he knows what he's talking about. So yeah, I just wanted to throw that in there.

I appreciate that. And I remember I was having great conversations and, you know, at first you're like, I'm really interested. And then we started working together and I was challenging you on some things and we had a great respect. Yeah. Some things I was pushing you to do maybe were not right. And some things I was pushing you to do, you were like, well, that's right, but I never thought about it. And you made our service and our product better for doing that. So, you know, fast forward 4 years. We started RentScale, we realized there was so much demand in the residential property management industry specifically. So I thought we were starting this whole RentScale thing as a side project, ended up being so successful, it took over all my time, my energy. Now we have, we've worked with over 250 property managers. We manage around 60 full-time sales professionals, BDMs on a weekly basis. And we are 100% dedicated. I spend all my time thinking about sales philosophy, the training, and the, you know, where the industry is going. And it's a blessed state to just get to focus on something so specific and work with people like you.

So, so if I, if I remember right, you sold off the marketing company that you had built to focus specifically on CRM systems and helping small business owners kind of sort out their CRM system. And sort of in doing that, put together a sales process. So that must have been pretty scary to kind of sell off a, a broad-based marketing agency and, and sort of niche down to this really specific targeted activity. And I wanted to ask you sort of where did that idea come from and what was the result of narrowing your focus like in such a dramatic way? What, like, was it scary to do that? How did it go?

It was so scary that the person who bought the agency from me was my number 2 at the time, and she had no belief in the vision that I had, and she was so against it, and she was so invested in the, the model we had. It's not like, you know, and I don't wanna mislead, it's not like I made some like giant, you know, 8-figure exit and some big, you know, uh, private equity firm came in and bought us. But I, I really, I basically realized that there was more opportunity that I was missing, and I was in a business that I didn't want to be in long term. So I actually sold off to the people in my business and that was percentage of revenue. It worked out really well. Everybody won and it freed me up to do this. So you ask where the idea came from. We all love the light bulb moment, but I think most big shifts in our life and our business are actually multiple light bulb moments that kind of stack on each other. And this was definitely one. So I think you've heard me talk a lot about how much I've learned from EO, or Entrepreneurs Organization, which I've been a member of for several years. And I joined with my marketing agency. We went through so many exercises, and one thing we did was— it's called— this is a great exercise if you haven't heard of it, Peter. It's called the waterfall exercise. And you take data in your business, whether it's your clients, the most profitable clients, or it's the most profitable marketing campaigns, or it's your most productive employees. Whatever dimension you care about, you basically chart them on an axis and it's like a bar chart and it's called a waterfall because at some point you realize that there's like a dramatic fall off and that's the waterfall. And so what I did in that exercise, we were a marketing agency, digital marketing. It was a hard way to make, make money as a small business, Peter, because we were doing SEO, we were doing social media marketing, we were doing like Google AdWords, we were setting up CRMs, right? We're like a 7-person company with like 17 services. Like, how do you, How do you hire for that? You know, it's the exact opposite of what I've seen you do with your business. How do you hire? How do you train when you have all these different businesses? It was basically me saying yes to every client who said, can you do this?

Right. And you end up with a bunch of generalists working for you instead of being able to really go deep. Yeah. And as, as I think about your trajectory, you know, you went from a marketing agency in general to like a CRM-focused sales You know, you were kind of niched down in that way. And then even further, you took that and you niched down to within a specific industry. I'm only going to work with property management companies. So your trajectory has been one of narrowing your focus and you've obviously had increasing success as you've kind of followed that path. So I think that's kind of fascinating and it's maybe a lesson for all of us that it's tempting to think, oh, well, You know, if I can just say yes to everyone, then my total addressable market is huge. But what you lose is like a depth and a, and a sort of laser focus on solving really specific problems for a really narrow set of customers in a way that nobody else can. And I think that, that seems to work really well for you. And we've had great success as well with narrowing our focus in that way.

I mean, I have a number of names for that. But the one that I probably default to the most is kind of the market focus paradox. Oh, I love that. And that was like, the skinnier my market got, the better my opportunities became. And the better, you know, competitive advantage I had. So when I think about you, Peter, like, you know, you're like, I'll start a property management firm. And you're like, but I'm gonna go nationwide. Anybody who's got a property, right? Like, you wouldn't even— you would have been out of business in like, 6 weeks because it's like, how do you spread that powder across all that advertising? And, you know, I've seen you and you're just like, just this one, you know, market in Ohio and just this one kind of investor. And by the way, also this one kind of portfolio makeup. And oh, let's add to that the goal that they have, right? And so you start to do that and it's like narrow and narrower. And I think the amateur business professional, our people that we hire sometimes, marketing agencies that we spend money on, they're just like, oh, you're thinking so small. The market could be so much bigger. And that's the paradox, right? I love that name. Definitely a lesson that like the skinnier my market got, the bigger my opportunity and the paycheck got from doing that.

Yeah. I love the name Market Focus Paradox. That's so great. So what's next? Are you only going to work with people whose first name starts with L or something like that? Just like even narrower, right? I want to make sure we spend plenty of time on sales because that's obvious, obviously your area of expertise. And I'd love if you could walk us through the wood chip metaphor, if that rings a bell for you, because I think this is such powerful imagery that I wanted to make sure that my audience got a chance to hear this because it made a real impact on me the first time I heard it.

You know, I use the wood chipper philosophy or analogy quite a bit. I've got a few others, but that seems to be the one that everybody likes the most. And so the idea is that You know, if you are selling wood chips, and you have a wood chipper, and you have wood, everything is good, right? But the day your wood chipper breaks, it doesn't matter how much wood you have. And in this analogy, the wood are raw leads or people that you can talk to. So I think so many people are like, if I just had more people to talk to, if I just had a bigger marketing presence, if I could just go out there and be in front of more people, then you think that you're going to have more wood chips, which are sales and new customers, right? So if you're a wood chipping company and your wood chipper breaks, all you're going to have is wood piling up on the, on, in the back, right? It's just going to keep showing up. It's just going to keep showing up. You're like, I don't know what to do with this. Stop everything. Let's focus on the wood chipper. Now, when your wood chipper is working, i.e., your sales process, and it's, it's honed and it's fueled and it's sharpened and it just is ready to chop. You're just saying, how can I get more wood? And I make the joke all the time. You'll even look around for like antiques, see what everything that might be more valuable.

I love it.

Yeah, you just see wood everywhere, right? You're just like, oh, the wood chipper is so good. Give me more wood. Let's just throw it in. And I think it's a great parallel for us in business. When your sales process is right and you're very focused, you know that you're looking for wood. You're not looking for coal. You're not looking for grass, you're not looking for cows, right? You know exactly who your target market is and you know that your sales process works, which is your wood chipper. You start to see wood everywhere. And so to me, the lesson that I try to impart on everybody is I get these phone calls and they're just saying, hey, I just need better lead gen, I just need better marketing. And I said, well, do you really? Because if you don't have a good sales process, you don't know exactly who you serve, you don't know how to convert that person, you don't have the right language, the right playbook, the people that can execute that, do you really even know what you're looking for? And so I just think people are casting their net so wide that it's to the point of futility.

Yeah, and something I see all the time is, to take this analogy one step further, and then I think we'll drop it, people who think their wood chipper's working great, but it really isn't. I run into this all the time. You know, sometimes just for fun, I'll ask folks at conferences, hey, what's your closing rate? You know, out of 100 leads that come in, how many of those turn into customers? And some people you talk to, they'll say, oh, you know, 90% for sure. And I'm like, I don't think so. I don't think you're really tracking those numbers. Like, it's been a theme in my life that when I actually dig into the numbers, what I expect doesn't match reality. And, and this has been as true for me as it is for anyone else. I don't mean to pick on anyone, but it was a shock for me when I first started using LeadSimple, which is the CRM that we use at our company. And I started inputting every single lead, not just someone who I met with, but anyone who called, anyone who emailed, anyone who got referred, they all go into the CRM. What percent of those actually turn into customers? So at our company, When I was doing sales by myself, which I did for 7 years, it turned out my closing rate was about 14%. It was like 12 to 14%. Okay. And then once we, once we went through your program, Jeremy, and we got a full-time salesperson or BDM, we can talk more about that. We're now consistently hitting 30 to 40%. So that's the power. And we, I want to make sure we hit on like the power of having someone fully dedicated to the sales function in a small business, because that's, that was, that's like the number one thing I tell people when they ask me, what would you do differently if you had to start over? I tell them, instead of hiring a salesperson in my seventh year of business, I would hire them in my first year of business. We'd been in a totally different place today. So yeah, I'm— have you also noticed that small business owners tend to drastically overstate their closing ratio. What do you, what do you say to somebody like that?

Oh my God. Yeah. You know, well, I, you know, I'll just, I love what you just said. It's, so I got a couple thoughts on that. One is if you ever, if you've ever hired a personal trainer or you ever said you've met somebody and said, hey, I'd like to change my body composition or lose weight or whatever, almost the first thing they do is say, would you keep a food journal for me? So it's such an easy parallel because when somebody asks you to keep a food journal, you remember the oatmeal you had for breakfast and you remember the salad you had for lunch and you remember the nice chicken marsala dinner you had, but somehow you forget about the 2 glasses of wine, the bag of M&M's, and the Cinnabon that you had when you were on your way to work, right? And it's just such an easy analogy because we don't lie to ourselves on purpose. We don't deceive ourselves. We have very selective memories. And I think that that goes for human beings individually and that goes for organizations. And that's why, you know, Peter, from the beginning, we always say every lead goes into the CRM because it's so easy to get a phone call and say, yeah, that's not a good fit. That's not going to go in the CRM. You know, oh, I don't think that person's going to buy from us. Like, that's not going to go in the CRM, right? And these are the numbers they're running on. That's where I think we deceive ourselves. And then secondly, we run into a lot of people, and I'm sure you can, you can reminisce to your early days, Peter, when you get this statistical insignificant number like 3 leads a month and you're like, well, I got 3 leads, I closed 100%. Well, it turns out it was your mother's boss, it was your cousin, and it was like your friend from college. Of course you're going to close that 100%, right? So are you— is that scalable though? Like when you go from 3 leads a month to 300 leads, is that really your closing percentage? So closing percentage has a lot of baggage, you know, is it statistically significant? Are you really keeping track of it? So those are the questions I like to ask that start to get people thinking a little bit better about it.

Yeah. And it goes the other way too. I've observed that a lot of the leads we get at our property management company, we're in Columbus, Ohio, we manage about 650 units. A lot of the leads we get are unqualified. They don't own a rental property. Now they're looking, they're thinking, they're building their team. You know, they want to invest in Columbus area rental properties in the future, but they don't yet own a rental property. Well, to me, that's not a qualified lead, so I don't count that against the closing ratio. They actually go into a separate section of our CRM. They have a separate follow-up pattern and a drip campaign that they get placed on. So there's, there's kind of two sides to that coin of the value of tracking the data instead of just going off of instinct.

In my perfect world, if it's my company, I want all those leads to go to the CRM, and I want them to be disqualified. And I don't want them to count against your closing ratio. But I want somebody else peeking into those and checking if they're actually disqualified leads, or if they're— if the, if the you know, the gate is a little too wide on who is being dismissed, right? So I'll just say that. But that's why I'm so fanatical that every lead should be in the CRM, right? And then you should categorize it as qualified, disqualified. And nobody needs to review every lead. We're not micromanaging, but somebody needs to be looking at those and giving a second opinion and saying, well, here's how I might have handled that. So that alone, as you scale, I think is solid advice to make sure you manage everything well.

100%. You know, something I've observed about you, Jeremy, is that in your own sales process, as you're trying to sign up clients for your business, you immerse yourself into the industry and the environment and the community of your customers. And to say it's in-depth would be even doing, you know, even doing you a disservice. I mean, You feel like a part of the community, just the same as I talked to another property management company owner. And I've seen that bring a lot of success for you and for other vendors in our community as well. And I think there's really something to this. And I've heard you talk about the value of getting close to your customer. Can you share a little bit about where that philosophy came from and how in practice you begin that process of inserting yourself into a community in a valuable way? I mean, anyone can just start to follow a bunch of people and, and spam a bunch of posts of low-value content. But how do you actually get into the community in a valuable way that doesn't come off as salesy, doesn't come off as transient? And I guess one further question is, how do you keep it interesting for yourself? Because sometimes when I think about our customers and where they hang out and what they talk about, I start to yawn. And I like, I couldn't do, you know, go do that every day. Like, do you find property management fascinating enough to keep your attention in that way or just talk a little bit about this?

Well, I chuckle because like 4 years ago, if you would ask that question, do I find property management interesting enough? I would have been like, I don't know. Like, it's just another service business. Like, that goes back to what we thought, which is the layers of focus and niche. I thought I was focused when Jordan found me 'Cause I only worked with service-based companies who wanted to generate leads and close them, right?

And you had something really, you had a great little line about, we work with companies from $1 to $5 million that want to double their sales in 18 months.

Or you had, you even had like a pretty tight, very specific, by the way, we are gonna talk probably positioning at some point. You know, we talk marketing. I think your, your superpower is knowing who you serve and going all in on that. And I, and I always say, if you can't, and this is a big part of the work we did together, Peter, and I think you really embraced this. I said, If you can't say to somebody confidently who you serve before they tell you who you are, you lose a lot of credibility. Like, we've all been in the trade shows, we've all been at the sales calls. They're like, they explain their situation to a T, and then the salesperson says, that's exactly who we serve. Like, really?

Like, do you really?

Yeah, of course. But if like Peter walks up to my trade show booth and I say, hey Peter, we're helping residential property managers, typically between 100 and 2,000 doors, who want to double their door count in the next 1 to 3 years. If that's you, I'd love to tell you more about that. I'm guessing that magnetizes the relationship and you're like, I don't need to tell you anything about me. Like, you are offering me the value, you're offering me the opportunity, and all I have to do is listen intently because you just touched a nerve. Like I said, and that's the opposite sometimes of this whole idea of like, you know, tell me everything about you. And then I just happen to serve people just like you. And, you know, coming from the service industry advertising, you know, there's other— we love a number of consultants in the property management industry, but sometimes I get on a call and we're kind of doing a biz dev and I'm like, who do you serve? And they're like, well, anybody who's in property management who has a problem. And I'm just like, what do I do with that? Like, how do I even— like, I wouldn't think of Peter. I don't think Peter has any problems. Like, if I think of somebody else, I'm like, I don't think they have any problems, right? But if they're like, oh, we're looking for companies who have outgrown their ability to have one property manager, and they're looking to build a team of managers, and they don't know how to do that, don't know how to manage it. I'm just like, my gosh, like somebody just popped in my head. So I know I got a little off topic, but that's why I'm just joking is like, I thought I was very— you thought I was very focused. I thought I was focused. What I'm learning is there's, you know, so many layers of focus, and this is what we're trying to to our property managers and we have different ways to focus and position. So what I'm finding, Peter, is the more focused I am, the more interesting it is for me. So what's great, and that's what I want for everybody listening, that's what I'm seeing you do and that's what I want for you, is you know my team, like I am building an amazing team. And so I spent the first 2 years trying to solve problems that were very important. And I got to the point where I was able to teach other people how to solve those problems. And so then I started solving bigger problems, right? And then I got to the point where I could hire people to solve those problems. And so, and I graduated. And so it's just a, it's just a, you know, it's kind of a recurring thing. It's like I'm getting more and more in depth and I'm learning. And now the industry, I am grateful, by the way, that this industry is expanding and increasing and more valuable. If I was selling paper at Dunder Mifflin and I was in a dying industry, I would be far less excited. So that's kind of my answer, is that I am lucky enough to be riding a crest and I'm solving problems that everybody needs, and then I'm able to train other people to do it, which I've seen you do. And then I'm solving the next problem level problems and I upgrade those people and we bring in other people and you just keep doing it. You keep stacking. I mean, enterprise is probably a unapproachable word for us, our small, like $1 to $2 million a year businesses, but we're enterprising. That's what we're doing. We're basically moving up the system— systemization level.

Yeah. And I love what you said just a minute ago, which is that the more narrow your focus is, the more interesting it becomes. I definitely think there's something to that where the more you can zoom in on a problem for a customer, that really catches your interest because you start to see potential solutions that can be valuable for them, and then you can extrapolate that and problem solve and bring those solutions to other customers just like them. So I love that. That's, that's really cool. Let's take a minute to thank this week's sponsor, Resident Benefit Packages by Second Nature. So professional property managers understand how important creating a great resident experience is in order to deliver a great outcome for not only the resident, but the owner and your property management company as well. But it can be very difficult to devise a solution in which all three of those stakeholders win. This is where resident benefit packages come in. So Second Nature has an incredible package, which I'm about to tell you more about. 1,400 management companies are using resident benefit packages by Second Nature. To help create this triple win experience. So here's a few of the things that you can include in this package. Filter changes, of course, residents getting filters changed on time. They arrive in the mail. It's a really great experience for the resident, helps them save on utility costs. They also have a utility concierge service you can include where internet, TV, and all the other utilities are taken care of for the resident on move-in. Not only that, they have a renters insurance program so you can bake in a master policy that way your renters have renters insurance as part of this policy. They don't have to go out and shop for it separately. And it's easier for you as a property manager because you can track certificates and compliance all built in. The last thing I'll mention here, which I love, is credit score reporting. So for your residents who are paying on time and in full, you're able to report that to the credit bureaus and help them build their credit score. You can wrap all this into a triple win resident benefits package by SecondNature. So if you're a property manager using an accounting platform, go to rbp.secondnature.com, mention this podcast, and they can show you what packages, positioning, and pricing that other professional property managers in your area are using to win. Thank you to RBP by Second Nature for sponsoring. Now let's get back to the show. Speaking about property management sales, I'm curious, since you have a lot of experience in sales in different industries, I think both B2B and B2C, How do you view sales in property management relative to other industries? And something I've always observed about the industry that we're in is it's not exactly B2B, because your customers, by and large, aren't professional real estate investors. In other words, my customer is not like a REIT or an institution, you know, an institutional real estate investor, at least for most of us. But at the same time, my customer is not Susie Q walking down Main Street either. My customer is almost like— sometimes I've called it like B2A, business to amateur, where our customers are amateur real estate investors. I don't mean that derisively. It's just, it's not their full-time job, right? So, so tell me a little bit about how you view sales in the property management world relative to the broader world of sales.

You asked me a really exciting question, Peter. I love that we're having this conversation. I think we're selling we're not B2B, which would be— so B2B for a large part is there's a committee. I hate B2B, right? There's multiple stakeholders, right? You gotta wait, you gotta get a champion. Hopefully they introduce you to the right people, and then you do all this work, and then, I don't know, Rick comes in and just torpedoes the deal because Rick's got his own guy or gal who does this, you know?

So B2B at a large scale, the world of proposals and RFQs and net 90 payment terms and—

Yes, net, oh gosh, yeah, payment terms and then procurement departments. Oh my gosh. I've been in that world. I'm slightly allergic to it. B2C is different because you're selling to consumers, right? And I think that word, that C is very important. Consumers just devour things and they either decide to buy another one or they don't. Like you're just constantly reselling for the most part. Take out big giant sales like real estate or anything like that. But most like B2C, like you have to not only sell the person, but then you have to resell them and you hope they re-up and do all these other things. I love that you said B2A. I have thought a lot about this. I, all my entire career, Peter, is what I call B2O, that's business to owners. I love selling business to owners. And when I sold you, Peter, I was owner to owner. I was like, hey, what are you trying to do? Like, where are you at? What's your next step? Like, you probably sensed it. It was very, you know, peer-to-peer consultative. Like, what are you trying to do? I can help you. I've seen this before. Oh, what you just said, I've seen that exact thing before. Oh, what you just said, I've never seen that before. Here's how I might approach that. I'm a little concerned. I can't guarantee anything because I've never done that before. So I know there's no acronym out there, but I've thought a lot about this. I think selling, what I sell at RentScale and what you sell at RLP Property Management is business to owner. And that's all we're doing. So they may be amateur owners, they may be professional owners, they may be second generation owners, but we're selling business to owner. And owners have an agenda. They have some experience, sometimes very shallow and very, you know, not scalable. Sometimes they've got decades of experience, they've got scars, scar tissue that we have to penetrate because they're just so sick of people messing with them or screwing them over. So that's my probably unexpected answer, Peter, is I think we sell business to owner and I love selling business to owner because you can really understand what somebody cares about and you can decide if you can help them or not. And you can feel really good at the end of the day if you just walk away and say, hey, look, I actually really don't think we're a good fit, but kudos to you. If you ever need something, call me and I'll be there for you. And it doesn't have to be you and me as the owners of the company. I think that my sales team can sell B2Owner and they can say, hey, like, you're not a good fit. If anything ever changes, call me back. I'm always a resource. I'm always in your corner. I can always help you out. So I think that's the exciting thing about selling property management.

You know, one of the things that makes it really challenging, in my opinion, is that your customer is very, very uneducated about the product, you know, what we're actually selling. And partially that's because property management is actually kind of a new industry. It hasn't been around for 100 years, not exactly in this, the current form. And it's partially because a lot of these folks are actually younger people that just bought their first investment property. And they're, they're hiring a property manager for the first time. And it's also because property management itself is not very well defined even within the industry. I mean, let alone geographic differences in how properties are managed, even within the same city, you go to 5 different property managers and ask them what's included and how it's charged and what if this happens and is there a contract and how do you make your money? You're going to get 5 or 10 wildly different answers from the owners of those businesses. So it's really, really hard because what you want to do on a sales conversation is, you know, differentiate yourself, talk about value, focus on outcomes, hit the pain points. But what you end up doing, if you're not especially strong at guiding the conversation, which I am not at all good at doing that, is they just— you end up playing— you end up being an answer dispenser. They just say, well, what's this? And how do you charge for that? And what's the price for this? And What happens if this happens? Tell me about your eviction process. Tell me about your tenant screening process. And you're just answering questions, answering questions, answering questions. And you and I both know that they're not, they're not going to make their decision based on whether you're going back 5 years on the eviction history or 7 years. That's not, you know, it's not a relevant buying criteria, but it's hard to really explain to them what their buying criteria should be. And I know you're, a big advocate of helping set the customer's buying criteria as a way to differentiate your company and sort of own that conversation. Can you share a little bit about how that's done in practice?

Oh yes, 100%. I mean, what you say, Peter, it really resonates with me. And we do this— it so resonates with me that, you know, I've been doing this for years and we train our sales team all the time, and nothing that I can say prevents us from getting on a call on Monday and recapping and saying the customer just doesn't get it right. Like, that is just what we've all experienced. And I'm sure you, you know, you've experienced that the customer is not always going to get it. It's our responsibility for the customer to get it. And not all customers will get it. We need to be okay with that, right? So that's one thing you always hear from me is I'm never going to sell you 100% close rate. As you said before, sometimes the clients are not right for you. Sometimes they're not ready for you.

Right?

So we need to be aware of that. It is not our job to convince everybody who we cross paths with to buy from us today. It's our job to know exactly who we're built to serve, how to help serve them, and then to be of service to them so that they want to buy from us. So, you know, that's how I approach the calls. I think the energy is like, you know, so important. And I say that as a person who talks about key language You get on a practice call. You know, I know, Peter, you've seen some of these where like, we're practicing that, like, you got to say the right words, you got to say it the right way, you got to label things the right way. It's all about the language. But all of that is like second-level stuff built on a foundation of mindset and what your goal is. So yes, people are calling us and they have no idea what they want to do. They think the buying criteria— like, I always joke, I don't joke, but I say this all the time, and I think that it lands well with a lot of our clients is that, you know, the tenant's Googling the 3 or 5 best property managers they can find, and they're building that mental spreadsheet. If you're a sales guy like me, the mental spreadsheet might have 3 columns. If you're a guy like Peter Lohmann, that spreadsheet's probably got 22 columns. It doesn't matter. You're just like, here's Acme, here's Mango Tree, you know, here's RL, right?

You're sort of, you're sort of like mentally placing If you're a prospective customer and you're calling 3 or 5 property management companies, when you get off the phone, you're sort of mentally placing them in a box. Like, oh, that's the guy that called me back really fast. Oh, that's the guy with the flat fee model. Oh, that's the guy who's the national company. Oh, that's the guy who's, you know, been, he's got the slick sales guy who was really pushy, right? I think I heard you say before that like we have this hope That we're going to give the customer a whole bunch of information about our company and they're going to remember all that. And they're going to set this like weighted average scoring rubric that's going to like, you know, line us up against all of our competitors and they're going to check for licenses and they're going to check years in business. And they're going to like make this totally rational, almost like computerized decision. But I know you, you believe, and I think it's true that customers are going to walk away from the phone call remembering one, maybe two things about you and your company. True.

And I think the contrast, Peter, I love that you're saying that because I do agree with that.

They're—

when they start the call, when I call you, Peter, I've gone to BiggerPockets, I've researched questions to ask property managers, maybe I've listened to your podcast or listened to another podcast, right? And I've been like, oh, these are the questions you should ask. So that's what I mean by in my mind, like they're building this spreadsheet and they're like, oh, what do you, what do you charge for tenant placement, right? What do you charge for this? What, what's my cancellation fee? So when they call us, in their mind, they're probably filling out a spreadsheet, right? It's our job on the sales call to obliterate that spreadsheet, right? And do what exactly what you just said. Yes, they will remember one thing. So let's be intentional about it. And if we don't do anything, if we're just Like if we're in customer service and not in sales, we're going to answer their questions and we're going to fill out their spreadsheet. And unless we've got killer graphics on our spreadsheet that is somehow going to win the business, like we're just, we're just doing customer service and we're wasting that lead, we're wasting that call. And that's why I want to be polite. And they say, hey, what do you charge for this? I say, well, here's what we charge. And I'm curious, just so I understand, what are you looking for in a professional manager? And I just want to make it about them. And what are your goals and what are you doing and I want to immediately convert it from a customer service, you know, worst-case scenario, lowest level of communication with a company to a high-value consultation, trusted advisor call. And I want to be clear with them, Peter, and this is what we talk about a lot, is, you know, it's like, we're probably not the right firm for you, or I'm not sure if we're the right firm for you, or it sounds like we're exactly the firm for you, or My gosh, you sound like my last 3 clients and here's exactly why. And I just want to repackage it in something that they can sit down at dinner and we've all been there, Peter, and tell their wife or their spouse or their business partner or whoever else they're answering to. I got a lot of data, but all I know is when I talk to Peter, it sounds like he does exactly what we need, you know, and there is no analytical substitute for that. Anchor of like, they do exactly, they're built to serve people just like me, you know? And I just think we discount that sometimes because there's so much involved in property management.

Yeah. All right, I'm going to pull out another analogy that you, I know you like to use because it's another fantastic one. So back to that dinner table conversation, something that helps your company stand out in your prospect's mind is when you can define their pro— is when you can define their problem better than they can. And I know you have a great story about a homeless guy where it just really slams this home and makes it vivid. And I, I'd love to hear you retell that if you don't mind.

No, I'm very happy to do that. Haven't told this one in a while, and thank you for reminding me to get back to that. But basically, you know, the concept is if you're gonna be a trusted advisor and people are buying things they've never bought before, That's all the guy, like the whole subject. If you're listening to this and you're comparing what we're talking about to like normal sales training where it's all like, you know, all these processes and features sell, you know, like all, or the, you know, story sell, features tell, which we believe in, but all this stuff, we are specifically trying to sell to somebody who's never bought what we've bought before, or never, we're trying to sell something that they've never bought before. And I think that's really important to remember because a lot of us in property management are doing that. And if we are selling them, they're changing for a reason, right? And that's also very valuable, valuable. And I think all of this stacks up on that. So what I learned many years ago, and I don't know where I learned this from, but if you can, if you can say what people are thinking better than they're thinking it, you are immediately the expert. And the polar example of that is this idea that if Peter and I are hanging out here in Boca Raton on the beach. We're sitting outside one of those nice beachfront places where there's like a running trail beside it. We're just having a great conversation. And I asked Peter how he's doing, what's going on. And Peter says, you know, I'm having this weird shoulder pain and I'm not able to sleep at night and it's freaking me out. And I've been to the doctor, I've been to 3 doctors and nobody seems to know what it is. They all just think it's, you know, maybe it's just a stretching thing. But I've done everything they've told me and I just like, I literally like, it's consuming my energy. It's all I think about. And then meanwhile, which there's not homeless people in Boca, I should have picked a different city, Peter. But let's just say somebody is like pushing a shopping cart down the beach walk and they've got a giant Happy Gilmore beard and they've got tons of cans. And he looks at Peter and he says, Peter, he's like, are you talking about the shoulder pain where when you sleep at night, but you can only sleep when you lift it above your head? But then when you move it like this, it's temporarily like better only for a few minutes. And then if somebody massages it, it actually sends like, you know, nerves down your back. And he would look at that homeless guy with the Happy Gilmore beard and the shopping cart full of cans, and he would have Peter's rapt attention. He would be like, yes, you know, he's like, I fixed that. And here's what I did. Like, he would listen. He would like bypass the 4 medical doctors because he described his pain so well that he knew that he was being heard. And so it's a, it's a, you know, it's a hyperbole example, right, Peter? But it's just, it just goes to show if you get on a sales call with me and everyone's like asking you the same questions, what keeps you up at night? What are you trying to do? But then I see you, I penetrate your soul and I understand exactly what you're going through and what problems you're having and what you're trying to accomplish. And I can actually list the 3 things you've tried to do that have not solved your problem, I could just be like, well, all you need to do is buy some unicorn seeds and plant them in your backyard, but only on a full moon. And you'll probably do it because I've described your problem so well. So I like to use extreme examples, Peter, but it's true. We all agree when people can describe our problem better than we can, we trust them. And I think there's a lot of value in that.

Let's take a minute to thank this week's sponsor, AppFolio. With AppFolio Property Manager, all of your business-critical workflows from marketing to leasing to accounting and work order management can be completed on one powerful, easy-to-use platform. You know how important it is to me that your data is transparent and easily accessible, and that workflow and process automation is at the forefront of property management software design. Some of the features built into AppFolio that customers love the most are online payments, rental applications, maintenance requests, text messaging, virtual showings. These things are all built into the platform. You can have a central repository for all your data and workflows, meaning less back and forth and more transparency. Afluyo automates the back office, including manual tasks like accounting, so your team can focus on what matters, like growing your business and delivering great customer service. Every customer receives ongoing support with options for self-serve training, video tutorials, how-to resources, instant chat, and phone support by appointment. Appfolio goes out of their way to make sure you have a great experience using their product. Let me read a quote from Karina Lyons at Concept Property Management. She says, Appfolio has allowed us to streamline our workflows so we can focus on what's most important. Our relationships. Thank you to Appfolio for sponsoring the show. Let's get back to it. One of my kind of missions with this podcast is to help property owners, property management company owners grow and scale their business and help them be successful and kind of be a resource, be the resource that I wish I had had when I was just starting out or when I was just at a few hundred units. And I know right now there's a large percentage of the audience who owns a property management company who's doing the sales work themselves. They are taking calls from prospective customers. They're preparing property management agreements, sending them out for signature. Maybe if they're really good, doing some follow-up calls and emails for those who didn't sign up. And there's a fear, and I know because I felt it around Hiring someone to do that work, outsourcing the sales function in the business, because there's this sensation in your heart and in your brain that there's no way a prospective customer is going to take some dopey sales guy seriously if they get on the phone with them. A prospective customer wants to talk to the owner. They want to talk to the guy in charge because that guy's going to know all the right answers to the questions. And is gonna be able to reassure them and they're gonna feel like, okay, this, you know, this talking to the owner, right? They're not gonna want to talk to anybody else. And the other thing that's going through their mind, 'cause it's going through my mind, or it was a few years ago, is there's no way a salesperson could ever learn everything they need to know about the business in order to be effective. Because what ends up happening on these sales calls, the prospect asks you a million questions about all the weird random things that can happen in property management, and a sales guy is not going to know anything about that. So, Jeremy, what would be your advice to somebody who is currently in this mindset? And assuming we could get them comfortable with the idea of hiring a salesperson, what would be the first step in kind of making that happen?

This is a great question, Peter, and I totally, totally get that. So my personal story is, I ran service companies from the time I was 20 years old to now. Way too often I need to move on to something else, but this is what I do. I'm stuck with it and grew a great business. I thought it was amazing, but for the first 12 years of me running my service companies, my personal identity was I can hire people to deliver the service. I can hire people to I can send the invoices, I can hire people to do customer service. But like sales is my identity, right? That's like my value. And I always call that the Jeremy show. And I thought that that was my value in the business and nobody else could do that. And I realized looking back that I think I thought I didn't want to give that away, not because it couldn't be given away. I didn't want to give it away because I was like, well, if I give that away, value do I have as a business owner? And so that's one question I want to pose to the audience. Do you not want to give it away because you don't think anyone can do it? Or do you not want to give it away because that's kind of become your identity and that's the only thing you can do? What I learned is the right clients actually don't want to talk to the business owner. A lot of clients do want to talk to the business owner, and they should always have access if they really need it. But 20 years into my entrepreneurial career, if I'm buying a service and I'm speaking to the business owner, I start to question, you know, can these guys handle me? Like, can they, can they handle— can they live up to this? Do they have redundancy? Are they professional? And so I think that there's a little bit of like self-delusion that we think that clients only want to talk to the owner. But think about it, I can call the guy that I met at BNI who can manage my finances, who's a personal finance officer, or I can walk into JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley or these other companies, and I can get access to a whole team of people that have redundancy. And we can argue which one is better, but it's a different customer who's buying that. And what I've learned is that if you want a boutique, they want to talk to the owner. If you want a scalable company, those clients actually feel a little uncomfortable talking to the owner on a daily basis. Do they love a call from me or from Peter on a regular basis? Do they love when we like show up at a conference and we're hanging out with them? Yes. Do they want to feel like they have to wake up on a Tuesday morning and we're the one that's going to keep the sales appointment? I think the really mature, responsible financial adults can see that that can be a little unscalable. So that's what I would say, Peter, is that I think that that's a story we're selling to ourselves.

Yeah, and I 100% agree. And I can tell you, since we hired our BDM almost 2 years ago now, I don't think I've ever had Doug— his name is Doug— I don't think he's ever called me and said, hey, I've got a prospect. He's just about to sign, but you know what? He said he wants to talk to the owner first. That's literally never happened. So I love that. Yeah. I wanted to help for anyone who's on the fence. I want to help them make that leap. Cause again, if I could do it all over, I would have hired a salesperson almost on day one. So for anyone who was just convinced—

let me add one thing, Peter, because I really liked this because for you didn't love to do the sales. I did, right? So I think there's a lot of people that are more in my court. And I think about this Jack Welch quote that I love. And Jack Welch, who we all know, built GE. He said, I've always been the best salesperson in any company I've ever run, but I can't sell as much as 10 salespeople. And so if you're deluding yourself and thinking that nobody can sell as good as you, yeah, you can't sell as much as 10 people. And I'm not saying you need 10 people tomorrow. But I am fortunate enough to have a 3-person sales team. And I promise you, Peter, this business is way bigger than when I was doing all the sales when you hired me, because I had to sell and then I had to go do the service and all this other stuff. Like, get over it, get over it. Like, that is the next level. That's all I want to say.

Yeah, and I've actually heard of— the company is escaping me, but there's a company in our industry in property management where the owner founder really loved the sales in the way that you're describing and wanted to remain in the sales, in a sales function. So he actually hired a CEO, his boss now, and took a job as a salesperson at his own company. And he truly abdicated, maybe abdicated isn't the right word, but he truly empowered his CEO to be in charge of all the other functions and in charge of the sales function. Such that he would be given quotas and, you know, really expected to be held even as the owner to the same standard as the other BDMs at that company. I thought that was like a really powerful and insightful message, which is, hey, if your highest and best use, to use a real estate analogy, if your unique ability is sales, great, stay in sales, but you still need a system that's replicable because ideally you're gonna get to the point where you need more than one salesperson because the volume is just so high. So if someone wanted to start along that path, what's the first step in actually developing a scalable sales system?

Great point. I think, you know, I, I don't want to be so cavalier as to say that everybody should just, um, go build a sales team tomorrow. I think that we all need, and you know, Peter, you kind of went through this, I went through this, As the only salesperson in the company, you need to document what you're doing and you need to wake up every day on a Tuesday and take a sales call and not say, here I am, it's the Jeremy show, give me what you got. You got to start saying, hey, this is my goal for this call. This is what I'm trying to do. Let me reverse engineer that. Let me understand how to manage my pipeline. If you want to scale, you will be dealing with more prospects than you can possibly just memorize everything about. I think that's one of the very first steps in growing, Peter, is you move from this idea that I'm only talking to enough people that it's all right here. It's all in the head. I'm only talking to 3 or 4 people a week. What does it look like when you're talking to 10 people a week, 20 people a week, and it takes 90 days to close a deal. You need different situations, right? You need a CRM, you need a process, you need to follow up. So even if you're a Mr. Owner or Mrs. Owner just closing, you know, 3 people a month and you're saying, I'm really good at that, what would that look like to train somebody else to do that? And then you don't even need to pass it on. You can do that at 3x, 5x, 10x, right? Have those details in your CRM, have a process that you're following, and break those steps down. That's the simplest thing, right? And so it's so foreign to the business owner who's so good at sales. From there, you know, we start getting into complicated things like playbooks and practicing the objection handles and not handling— like knowing that you're only gonna get hit with like 6 to 11 the same situations over and over again, not reinventing the wheel, having the best way to do that. When you have all that stuff on paper, when you're ready and there's enough wood to put in the wood chipper and you feel like your wood chipper is in healthy condition, then we need to get more wood chippers, right? And that means hiring other BDMs, other salespeople. And sometimes, you know, as Peter's kind of alluded to today, sometimes just having somebody else that's full-time focused on something, even if they're not as good as you or better than you, can actually get you better results. And I think that's another paradox that we forget about is, you know, if you're the owner of the company, you have a lot of demands on you. You don't wake up 5, 6 days a week just ready to close business. You have so much else on your plate. I feel like somebody that's 70% as good as a salesperson as me, as the owner, that has nothing to do but 100% of their time to go close business and they're compensated for that, they're going to kick my butt every day.

Couldn't agree more. Yeah. And one of the things I like to say is you have to get comfortable with 85%. As a business owner, when you start hiring employees, it can be very difficult, especially for a kind of a detail-oriented personality. Like for me, my engineering background, I'm all about getting things exactly right. It can be very difficult to bring in employees and observe them not getting it quite right, right? Like they're not doing it the same way I would do it, or maybe they're even making small mistakes, but you have to get comfortable with that. You have to just let it play out. And part of the learning process is making mistakes. You don't want to rob your employees of that growth opportunity. And the other part is, you know, just like you were saying, there's a scale factor, right? Like me getting it 100% right or, or 100% throughput is nowhere near as effective as 10 people at 85%, right? And for the super, super important stuff, yeah, you put in some, some double checks and some fail-safes. So like, you don't, you know, no catastrophic errors are happening at the company. But for me, that was a mental block that took literally years to overcome is, okay, I guess like not everything's just going to be perfect and I'm just going to move on. And that is the right answer, but it feels wrong. It feels for me and my background and my upbringing, it felt, it felt like cheating. It felt morally wrong to allow work that wasn't 100% correct to, to sort of move through the organization or, or maybe even go out to a customer. So it just really took me a while.

I would, I would love to share a concept on that, Peter, that I've been thinking a lot about. Jordan and I actually talked about this in San Antonio. I think it's a really coming-of-age concept that I've been through for entrepreneurs. And because I love what you just said, from my upbringing, it felt, and I'm going to paraphrase, kind of felt dirty to know that something could have been done that wasn't done. It could have been a little bit better, but it wasn't. Personally, I love that. We need that. So the concept, which we all know, most of us graduated high school. I did not graduate college. You have engineering degrees, but we all know this concept and it's micro versus macro, right? I mean, that's like the one thing I took away from high school economics I'll never forget. And micro is that concept. It's like, this is my project, it's right in front of me. I can go an extra 10%. Macro is how do I create a process that 10 people can follow? How do I create a process that can show up every single day? There's a lot of nuance and it doesn't clog the conveyor belt, right? We can figure it out. There's a good enough process for it. And I know this comes from engineering as well, right? It's a standard. If we meet that standard, yeah, you could have sat there and thought about it for an additional 4 hours and got an additional 6%, but that's microthinking. So as we scale, In our jobs, like the things, like when I write content, when like the things that I'm still responsible for, when I'm hiring a salesperson, when I'm thinking about it, when I'm speaking at a conference, I am that, Peter. I am micro. I'm like, I could spend an additional 10 hours, I can get 4% more out of this. That's me, that's in my core. But if I'm growing the company, I can't expect that. Like at, at a macro level, I cannot expect Everybody to do that or the whole shop is going to shut down. And so I think we need to live with that dichotomy, this disposition of micro is for me and macro is for the company. Most of us who build companies are micro-focused, high-level achieving, high standards people. And I don't want to say you got to let go of your standards because you don't, but I think you just got to think, am I making a micro decision or I'm making a macro So I want to make sure we give you a chance to share what's next for RentScale.

I'm, I'm super curious myself, but before we get to that, an area in sales and marketing that I don't see discussed very frequently in our industry of property management is outbound. Most of what we're discussing and focused on is inbound sales, which is calls and emails and voicemails are coming in. And we are hopefully picking up the phone on the first ring or calling back within a few minutes because people are calling because they're interested in our services. Outbound refers to the idea of we're going out into the world proactively and prospecting for potential customers. Have you seen outbound done well in property management? What are your thoughts on how this can be done effectively in our industry, or do you feel like it's just a complete waste of time? We're in the new world of content marketing and that's, that's the old way.

Great question, Peter. I do think outbound can work really, really well. And my basic thesis for that is that I don't know, I'm making up a number, right? Like 75% of stats are all made up, right? But let's just say the overwhelming percentage, Peter, and feel free to disagree with me if you have research otherwise, 80% of our ideal prospects are not looking for us on any given day.

I think that's completely correct.

Yeah. So if you just— if we believe that the majority of our prospects are not looking for us on any given Thursday, which we're recording this podcast, it's a little bit, you know, deceiving to think that like, well, I got no leads, the phone's not ringing, nobody— there's nobody I can do business with, right? So listen, I love the RentScale parallel because we started sales training coaching for property management companies. And we built a multimillion-dollar business 4 years in. And if we just sat out there and said, let's SEO optimize for property management sales training, we'd have—

Yeah, what's the traffic on that service?

We may be lucky.

5 or 6 a month.

We may be lucky if we have 2 clients at this point, right? So I love to use that example because, you know, never, never preach what you don't have never done before yourself, right? And so that's why I like that. I'm like, we just sat around and been like, let's just go SEO optimize a website. Well, we'll like buy some leads and we'll see if anybody wants to hire a property management sales company. We took the fight to the crowd and we called people like Peter and we, you know, we went on the podcast. That was a great example of inbound lead, by the way. But we are out there doing it. We're out there spreading the message. For every Peter, I promise you in Renscale's history, there's another 5 people we said, hey, you look just like Peter, you run a property management company, do you want to grow? We can help you. No pressure. Can we have a conversation about where your stocks are, what you're looking for? That's the way we do outbound. And the way we do outbound and the way we teach outbound is the opposite, unfortunately. Like one of my favorite movies ever is Wolf of Wall Street. I could watch that thing all day long, Peter. The problem with Wolf of Wall Street and movies like Boiler Room and all these things is that they train us to think like, I called, it's a yes or no decision, and if it's a no, it didn't work. The yes, I'm good. And that is more realistic in an— not even really, but like, that's more realistic in an inbound situation. But outbound, the call should be, hey, you look a lot like our clients. "If you ever need our help, this is how we can help you. Are we cool? Great. I'm going to follow up in a month or a quarter." And you do that over and over again and you stack this insane network of people who know who you are and you become the trusted advisor in your community. And every now and then you call that person on the first call and they said, "It's actually amazing you called me. Like, I need a new property manager." But that's not going to happen in your first call. It's not going to happen in your 12th call. If you get lucky, it's going to happen on your 100th call. But over time, if you have 150 people that you're checking with every single quarter in your community in Columbus, Ohio, that's 150 people that will not go to Google and will not search for a property manager the day they decide to use one. So it's basically about having lines in the water. It's about having the network. So I just try, like, I'm constantly trying to reprogram people. Like, in fact, here's the best example. So we love Wolf of Wall Street. They make the calls. He says all the right words. He's super smooth. Meanwhile, I actually read Jordan Belfort's book on sales. And you know what he did to be so successful was he said everybody had a list of all the people they should call, and they called them all, and they said in one call, do you want to buy this stock or not? It's a hot stock. You should buy it. So what he did strategically is he had the audacity to make two calls. He called them the week one, and he said, hey, I only call people when I have a really hot stock. Can you tell me what you're looking for? What would your purchase be? What kind of stock? What kind of return are you looking for? Okay, I'll only ever call you back if I have that. And then he called them the second week, and he just happened to have that. And that was actually how he broke through by simply turning a one call into two calls. Imagine if you take two calls and you turn it into a quarter or six months, which is what we teach, which is just building a community of people that you're advising. And, you know, if you've ever been in BNI, you know that there's major life and business events that will happen. My goal is that our clients are never competing with Google because nobody ever searches the interwebs because they already know Peter is in their court. And like, that's my guy. If something ever happens, if I ever need to make a change, this guy's been following up forever. Like, so that's my, you know, that's my 30-second— well, it's probably a 3-minute spiel on outbound, but that— I just think people are thinking about it wrong.

Yeah. All right. I got to push back slightly. So when you are prospecting for clients for your business, your prospective clients are property management company owners. So it's very simple. You go on LinkedIn, you do a little, you pay for their premium, whatever the heck it's called. And you search for people who have a job title of CEO or owner or founder in the property management space. And you get a list of 100,000. No, probably not that many. 1,000. Well, you get what I'm saying though. They're out there. You can look at their websites, you can get their phone numbers and their email addresses. The problem that we have as as people who are trying to find the contact information for property owners is no one has in their LinkedIn profile, I own a duplex in Columbus, Ohio, or I own a 10-unit property in Columbus, Ohio. Because again, this is their part-time thing. They're not a professional. So what would be your suggestion for someone who's looking to build an outbound campaign? Where would you go to get— you know, it sounds like the most dumb question ever, but where do you get the leads? Like, where's the list, right? And I hate that, I hate to ask that, but it's a legitimate question because there's no like clear answer in my mind.

I love this question, Peter. So when I, when we were coming up with this, so in my mind, you know, we have very clear definitions on this. So a lead is somebody that you know their contact information and you know they're interested. Prospect is someone you know, they're all those two things, you know, their contact info, you know, and you know they're qualified. I think what we're talking about is targets. Targets is like me Googling somebody and being like, you own a property management company, I have your contact info, but I don't even know if you're interested, right? So I know like I'm getting imprecise, but you're an engineer, you love precision, right? So I call these targets. I never call these leads. Leads are people that say I'm interested and they could be a total Joe Schmo and they like just read, you know, a book about real estate investing. They watched a BiggerPockets podcast and they, I know property that could be a lead, not a prospect because they're not qualified. So we're talking about targets. So I just really want to drive that home. So I think there's a lot of parallels. We can Google a bunch of like, by the way, there's no, you know, property manager owner database. So we go to property management conferences, regional and national. You could go to real estate investor conferences locally, right? You could host your own. We host our own events. You could host your own events, great parallel. We go to the internet and we Google a bunch of stuff. There are amazing software out there, PropWorks, Redfin, ProspectNow, so many amazing, like I can literally draw, like I love to teach the ProspectNow because every time as a BDM, if I closed in a neighborhood, whether it's a gated neighborhood or just a neighborhood that's got a name, you know, I know like, I don't know much about Columbus, but I know here, you know, it's like Palm Beach Farms is right down the street. I live in Waterside. If I closed a new tenant in Waterside, you can draw a box around Waterside and I get all of the unoccupied owners and I call them all or send them emails or I'd send them direct mail and say, your neighbor in Waterside just rented with us. He just got $6,500 a month. I mean, the rents are outrageous here in South Florida, so I'm just making up these crazy numbers. But it's like, if you've ever wanted to think about renting this property, I'm your guy, please call me and I'll have a great conversation with you. So that's like, it's not the call, like I'm not judging my April on I didn't close any of those people. I'm judging my April and I was like, I have 150 new people in my network. And next, this in May, I'm gonna have 150 people more. And come December, I'm gonna have 400 people 15,000 people that are talking to me on a regular basis. And golly gee whiz, out of 15,000 people, somebody's going to buy property management. So that's just really the way that I think about it.

Yeah, well, something I've seen you and other vendors in our space have a lot of success with is, you know, circling all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, inserting yourself into the community in a trustworthy and legitimate way, not in kind of like a sleazy,, you know, transactional way and then providing valuable content to the industry. I've seen the content that RentScale puts out. It is incredibly valuable. It's well-researched, it's well put together. It's the type of thing where I save the PDF, I print it out and I'm like reading it over multiple times. Like this is really, really good stuff. So to answer my own question, and we are working on this. Surprise, surprise, I feel like the answer here is you, you produce content that is exceptionally valuable. I'm not talking about fluff blog posts. I'm not talking about like low quality. You feel like you have to do it podcasts. I'm talking about deeply researched, well-considered pieces of content, whether that's a podcast or a video series or a PDF or a newsletter, something like that. And then you, you go out into the community of real estate investors and you, and you share that in a no-obligation type of way. Like, hey, I care deeply about the problems you're facing. I understand them. We have a solution. It may be right for you. It may not be right for you, but I wanted you to have this. And by the way, you got to put in your email address to get it. So here you go.

Right.

So, so that's, that's what we're pursuing. There's still this problem of like, how do you get their contact information? I know there's these databases out there. I question like the integrity of some of that data, but it's, it's a problem we're working on. I think one way around this is you can, you can sort of enmesh yourself with referral sources. So in real estate, there's a ton of professionals who touch real estate transactions. Think about the realtors and the brokers and the lenders and the lawyers and the CPAs. All these people who sort of are acting as advisors for their clients around a real estate or a real estate transaction, which is a great time when people are looking for a new property manager. So if you can enmesh yourself in that network and become a trusted advisor to those folks, they're likely to introduce you to their clients. That gives you an opportunity to share this content. So we're working on this. I love your idea here. I want to ask you, I know we just have a couple minutes left.

I just want to challenge their listeners not to be married to digital content that can be downloaded, which I, you know, I believe in, right? You and I both know Mark Ainley in Chicago kind of running, you know, straight up Chicago Investor. My gosh, like I flew out to his 100th episode party and there was just the whole real estate community was out there and it was like, I, I flew all the way from Boca Raton just to like high-five Mark, and I couldn't talk to him because he was completely like, you know what I mean? He was mobbed.

Exactly.

So there, there's no framework for that. Like, he came up with that, he did it. He's, you know, you've watched him, he's done a great job on it. Like, your podcast is amazing. His podcast was just specifically designed to attract investors in Chicago. And it was just mind-blowing what I've seen him do. That's one example that takes a little more work than just like a digital, because I think that people can just get locked into like, I need a video, I need a PDF, I need something like that, right? So there are other examples out there. I've got several that are not coming to mind that I've seen. I think Richard Drake, Renters Warehouse Houston, before the pandemic, he had one of the, like he had a 250 monthly investors summit where people would get together for a happy hour after work. And anybody like they were all trying to buy their first property, right? And they were just going into them. So I just want to challenge the group. Like, it's like sometimes you got to swing the pendulum from efficient to effective because we're all like optimizing. We all want like the drip campaign. We all want the easy stuff, you know, the quick win. What can you do that's just like crazy effective that like nobody else would even compete with? So I just wanted to say that when you think about the lead gen stuff.

100% agree. And I've learned so much from listening to you and Jordan Whaler around this topic. I mean, it's literally been like a master's level course on sales and marketing, just absorbing the information you guys have been putting out. I think when I think about trying to go after a market, like, I think the right frame of mind here is like, forget everything, you know, forget everything you've ever heard. Forget all the blogs, forget all the recommendations, forget about Google, forget about all that garbage. Just go sit in a room somewhere and think. And, and what you need to think about is, who is my customer? You need to define that first. Then you need to think about where are they, where are they hanging out both in real life and digitally, like online. And then you need to think about what would be valuable for them. How can I show them that I know what I'm talking about and, and legitimately improve their lives in some way? Related to your service, right? And I think if you do that in a very directed way, you're gonna come up with creative solutions that aren't gonna be on a top 10 list of how to market somewhere on the internet. This is gonna be unique to you, it's gonna leverage your strengths, and if you go after that, I think you're gonna have a lot of success because that's frankly what I've observed leaders in our industry and leading vendors in our industry do. They're not following a playbook somewhere from 10 years ago. They're, they're creatively thinking about, because they actually care about their customers, how can I solve problems for them? How can I make them aware of the solutions that we have? So I love it. I want to hear maybe briefly what's next for RentScale, where, what, any big, you know, plans, secret plans you can reveal here on the podcast coming next, any new product lines, anything like that. And then where can people go to learn more about you, Jeremy, and RentScale?

So obviously rentscale.com is a great place to go. I'm fairly active on— not as active as I used to be, but fairly active on Facebook. Taking your, your mold, Peter, I've fired up the Twitter account. I'm expecting to be back there kind of watching what you're doing, which is great. But honestly, just RentScale, you know, kind of get on our list, follow us on Facebook. We're constantly doing webinars, we're constantly teaching, we're hosting. You've been to some of our events, you've spoken at an event, Peter, which was amazing, which, you know, you don't have to give us any accolades now, but I mean, we're just doing very unique things, you know what I mean? Like we are truly creating some events which I think are amazing. We got some awesome stuff coming up, probably bore everybody right now. It's just like too abstract, but we are, We're doing nothing but leaning into residential property management. We're creating more learning tools. We might have some certifications that are coming up. We're expanding our teaching not only on the sales profession but on the real estate investing profession. So you were part of our event in Lauderdale. You saw we had day one, which was real estate investing info. Day two is sales and persuasion. Expect a lot more from us on real estate investing info. BiggerPockets style, but specifically for professional property managers. That's, that's probably the best way to shape.

Love it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jeremy, for coming on the show today. This was really fun.

This was great. Peter, love what you do.

Thank you for listening to Owner Occupied. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLOHmann. And subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week.